Social trading—also referred to as copy trading—is an interactive platform-based innovation facilitating visibility and traceability of signal provider trading activities. Based on published portfolio transaction and return track records, platform users can copy one or several signal...

In this article, we assess whether German private investors gamble in the stock market. Other studies that have analyzed private investors' preferences with regard to lottery-like characteristics have used retail or discount brokerage data. They have shown that stock trading has common...

Our study contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between financial literacy and households' investments in risky assets. We estimate a structural equation model with data from the Panel on Household Finances of the German central bank. Our results show that although...

Our study contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between financial literacy and households' investments in risky assets. We estimate a structural equation model with data from the Panel on Household Finances of the German central bank. Our results show that although...

We survey 231 undergraduate students to analyze how retail investors' characteristics influence their decision to use a robo-advisor. Characteristics such as the willingness to take risk, extraversion, and optimism are significant in univariate tests but the willingness to take risk and the...

Robo-advisers enable investors to establish an automated rebalancing strategy for a portfolio usually consisting of stocks and bonds. Since households’ portfolios additionally include further frequently tradable assets like real estate funds, articles of great value and cash(-equivalents), we...

Herding behavior, i.e. the adjustment of a decision maker's behavior, opinion, or expectations due to real or illusionary (social) pressures, can be explained by numerous behavioral finance models, such as the cascade model or contagion. However, unambiguous empirical results are rare, mainly...

We examine the relation between households' wealth and relative risk aversion (RRA) in two different frameworks: the Behavioral Portfolio Theory (BPT) and Merton's (1969) consumption and portfolio choice model (CPCM). We apply the BPT to field data for the first time and show that the BPT...

Purpose: Retail investors use information provided by mutual fund rating agencies to make investment decisions. This paper examines whether the ratings provide useful information to retail investors by analyzing the rating migration and closure risk of mutual funds that received Morningstar's...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to derive the determinants of young adults' subjective and objective risk attitude in theoretical and real-world financial decisions. Furthermore, a comparison of the factors that influence young adults' and older adults' risk attitude is...